Lenovo's Yoga Book is what the company is calling, "the first tablet for natural sketching and note-taking," and "the world's thinnest and lightest 2-in-1." What makes this tablet so special? Lenovo's "halo keyboard." Much to the chagrin of typists everywhere, this is a purely touch keyboard, which makes the "thinnest and lightest 2-in-1" claim true. But Lenovo claims over 18 months of development work has gone into testing and improving the halo keyboard, including features such as haptic feedback and accidental keypress detection.

The halo keyboard.

But why did Lenovo include a touch keyboard at all? Besides the benefits of making the device thinner, the halo keyboard can turn off the illuminated keys and become a massive drawing tablet. There's a stylus for the drawing aspect, but you can even place paper on top of the holo keyboard and draw with Lenovo's Real-Pen accessory. The Real-Pen functions exactly the same as the stylus, and you only need to replace the ink with standard ink tips - no recharging.

As mentioned before, the Yoga Book ships with either Windows 10 or Android. The Android version has Lenovo's Book UI, a skinned version of Android 6.0 with multi-window functionality and other tweaks to improve productivity. The Android tablet will start at $499, which is far lower than I was expecting it to be.

Comments

Yeah. What we want is a chipsets like Qualcomm's SD series that won't see driver support for newer versions of Android in a couple years. Intel sux! Amirite?

Matthew Merrick

Considering Intel has officially stopped supporting atom chipsets specifically made for mobile devices? This thing is starting its life with no support

mark

They're leaving the phone market, not the tablet or 2-in-1 market; and I see no evidence this means they'll drop support in a way that will impact existing devices.

dafuq

I have to admit that Lenovo is really innovative.

Nicholas C

How much do you wanna bet the windows one is going to be delayed or perpetually out of stock?

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Mike Kubik

Is there a downside with this being Android instead of Chrome OS?

Madis

Android is not really optimized for big screens, although it is changing with multiwindow.

Kawshik Ahmed

There will also be a Chrome OS version in the future. But Android let OEM tweak more the system so they could optimize it according to their device.

Drakenoid

There's also a Chromebook version coming according to omg Chrome

Audio

That's what I was hoping for!

Ian

Google pushes updates to ChromeOS devices. Owners of a Yoga Book will be relying on Lenovo to push Android updates. If history is any indication, they will be infrequent and late.

I definitely prefer a keyboard I can rearrange and move keys around, get different keyboards dependings on what app I'm running (e.g. games), and convert into either more screen real estate or additional input types (e.g. drawing) at will.

I'm not worried at all about typing on what equates to a touchscreen as long as they get the haptic feedback right.

Audio

You're right, just the screen portion would make an awesome tablet! Which is frustrating because Lenovo Android tablets are generally awful!

Michael

You can only make a pressure sensitive screen detect so many levels of pressure before it can't be transparent. I would imagine this gives greater levels of precision for pressure detection which is important when you want to use it as a starting/graphics tablet, but as far as I can tell they haven't released sensitivity details yet.

Madis

Note 7 has double the pressure sensitivity.

The real pen also registers 2,048 levels of pressure and 100 degrees of angle detection, allowing users the control and precision of a pencil or paintbrush.

Oops, I guess I misunderstood the post. I thought it said you could use "a real pen" (read: any actual pen) on it, in which case the pad would have to be pressure-sensitive. I didn't realize that was the name of the stylus, but now reading that official blog post I see it is indeed the pen that enables the pressure sensitivity.

Ailín Ó’S

This sounds like such an interesting device, especially running full blown Windows 10.